Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 11:53:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rex Wockner
Subject: NC1430: AUSSIE GAY PAPER TARGETS KEMP
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 19:41:01 +1000
From: Capital Q Weekly
To: rwockner@netcom.com
Subject: CQ's Story on Kemp
15 August 1996
Rex,
For your information (to use or circulate if you want) here is the copy of
the Jack Kemp story which is running tomorrow, Friday, in Melbourne and
Sydney.
Peter O
Category: international
Newsgroups: Kemp.Dole.745*Repub.Pres.
Date Filed: 13 August 1996
Time Filed: 2010
Status: Copyright 1996 Peter O'Shea
Dole's mate Kemp: the stories abound
by Peter O'Shea
Jack Kemp, the man chosen by Republican Bob Dole to be his running mate in
the November US presidential elections, has a gay past - at least that's
the speculation resurrected by numerous news reports in the US this week.
While the nation's two largest gay lobby groups, the Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), issued a joint
statement condemning Kemp's anti-gay record in politics, others were
speculating that Kemp's record in bed is anything but anti-gay.
Associated Press this week ran a story in which one of Kemp's former
campaign managers was asked about a report dating back nearly 30 years
that Kemp participated in a wild gay party at a ski cabin, which he partly
owned with several gay men, in Lake Tahoe.
The story, which Charles Black who managed Kemp's campaign in 1988
dismissed as "totally unfounded", dates back to 1967 when Kemp worked for
then-California Governor, Ronald Reagan.
After the party the New York Times ran an article reporting that a
"homosexual ring" was running Reagan's office. At least one of Reagan's
aides was fired. Later, in the mid-1980s, Newsweek ran a report in which
Kemp maintained his investment in the cabin was strictly a business
arrangement.
Then in 1986 the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that an interview the
week before on NBC's Today Show, in which Kemp was asked whether he had
ever had a homosexual experience, had prompted his handlers to screen
future interviews and "bar any that go into the old slanders against him".
Black told AP this week the Lake Tahoe story was "a piece of poison".
"Every reporter or news organisation that ever looked into it concluded it
was totally unfounded," he was quoted as saying.
But that does not seem to be the case. The San Francisco Independent and
the New York gay newspaper LGNY also reported this week that Kemp, 53, who
is married with four children, is rumored to be gay.
LGNY reporter Andy Humm explained that "when someone being hailed as
supposedly tolerant and committed to civil rights is in reality someone
who shuts the door in faces of gay people on every single issue, it
becomes relevant if he is homosexual".
In addition, at least a dozen reports from US gay journalists and
activists on Kemp's supposed gay past have been passed onto Capital Q.
Capital Q has, however, been unable to substantiate them.
The reports come amid a mood of overwhelming disappointment on the behalf
of gay groups that Dole has picked a right-wing, populist, anti-gay,
pro-life candidate who opposed sanctions on apartheid South Africa, as his
choice of running mate.
The HRC and the NGLTF last Friday described the would-be US Vice-President
as "not as acerbic as some of his colleagues" but nonetheless someone with
a "solid anti-gay record".
In May this year, commenting on the US Supreme Court's decision
overturning an anti-gay constitutional amendment in Colorado, Kemp told
CNN one judge "was wrong in suggesting that the people of Colorado had an
animosity toward gay people. What they were basically saying, they
shouldn't get special rights".
In 1990 he also opposed a non-discrimination policy and limited family
benefits for gay government employees, telling the union, according to a
Washington Post report in March 1992, he would not approve the contract
"because the clause has been widely viewed as extending domestic
partnership benefits to gay and lesbian employees".
Kemp, who is a Distinguished Fellow of the arch-conservative, right wing
policy think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, also favours firing gay
teachers.
"I think a school board should have the right to choose what type of
example we have for our children in public schools," he said in an
interview with David Frost, according to a report in the Washington Post
late last year.
"Since gay marriage is polling better than Bob Dole he had to do something
dramatic," said HRC spokesperson, David M Smith.
"Though the move will be seen by many as a move to the political centre,
Kemp's record indicates a continued trend to the hard right with the party
firmly in the hands of religious political extremists dominated by the
Christian Coalition and the ultra right wing Council for National Policy."
-end-